The present invention relates to techniques for display presentation of a workspace within which display features are perceived as having positions relative to each other.
Spence, R. and Apperley, M., "Data Base Navigation: An Office Environment for the Professional," Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1982, pp. 43-54, describe bifocal viewing systems. As described in relation to FIG. 5(c), a surface on which icons are located, referred to as the wall, can be presented in three separate viewports; the central region presents a part of the wall in sufficient detail to permit the user to read its contents in full; two outer regions retain less detail. The user can scroll by touching an item in one of the outer regions and pulling it into the central region. In response, the whole strip of data is moved across the screen, preserving the spatial relationships between items. The representation of an item in the outer regions should not merely be a demagnified version of the central region representation, but rather a representation more appropriate to their lower resolution. As described in relation to FIGS. 6 and 7, scrolling can be in vertical and horizontal dimensions. As described in relation to FIGS. 8 and 9, zooming can provide additional levels of information.
In a video presentation made publicly available in 1983, Spence illustrated a bifocal display like that described in the article by Spence and Apperley. The video shows a column from a newspaper extending across the space between two pegs and, outside the pegs, extending backward at an angle away from the viewer, so that the part of the column between the pegs is legible while the parts outside the pegs are visible but illegible. The video also shows a strip of paper with colored rectangles attached to it, again with a fully visible part between the two pegs and the two parts outside the pegs extending backward at an angle so that the colored rectangles appear as narrow colored strips. Finally, the video shows a similar strip of paper in which the colored rectangle between the pegs includes text that is legible, while the colored rectangles on the parts that extend backward each have a single large character, resembling the features in FIG. 5(c) of the article by Spence and Apperley.
Furnas, G. W., "Generalized Fisheye Views," CHI '86 Proceedings, ACM, April 1986, pp. 16-23, describes fisheye views that provide a balance of local detail and global context. Section 1 discusses fisheye lenses that show places nearby in great detail while still showing the whole world, showing remote regions in successively less detail; a caricature is the poster of the "New Yorker's View of the United States." Section 3 describes a degree of interest (DOI) function that assigns, to each point in a structure, a number telling how interested the user is in seeing that point, given the current task. A display can then be made by showing the most interesting points, as indicated by the DOI function. The fisheye view can achieve, for example, a logarithmically compressed display of a tree, as illustrated by FIG. 4 for a tree structured text file. Section 4 also describes fisheye views for botanical taxonomies, legal codes, text outlines, a decisions tree, a telephone area code directory, a corporate directory, and UNIX file hierarchy listings. Section 5 indicates that a display-relevant notion of a priori importance can be defined for lists, trees, acyclic directed graphs, general graphs, and Euclidean spaces; unlike the geographic example which inspired the metaphor of the "New Yorker's View," the underlying structures need not be spatial, nor need the output be graphic. FIG. 6 shows a fisheye calendar.
Fairchild, K. M., Poltrock, S. E., and Furnas, G. W., "SemNet: Three-Dimensional Graphic Representations of Large Knowledge Bases," in Guindon, R., Ed., Cognitive Science and its Application for Human Computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J., 1988, pp. 201-233, describe SemNet, a three-dimensional graphical interface. SemNet presents views that allow users to examine local detail while maintaining a global representation of the rest of the knowledge base. As shown and described in relation to FIG. 1-1, SemNet represents a knowledge base as a directed graph in a three-dimensional space, with elements of knowledge represented as labeled rectangles connected by lines or arcs. Section 4.1, on pages 215-222, describes the application of fisheye views to SemNet, an example of which is shown and described in relation to FIG. 4-1. As described on page 218, tree distance is used to determine the degree-of-interest value for all the objects, including cluster objects that represent a set of elements. One drawback of this is that, when the viewpoint is moved, the objects that are displayed change abruptly between being a set of elements and a cluster object at invisible subdivision boundaries. This can be ameliorated by using euclidean distance to tell when a boundary is being approached, then highlighting the clusters that are about to change. Pages 220-221 describe how three-dimensional point perspective achieves a fisheye effect, with each object changing in size based on importance; the objects could also change in form, from an icon to smaller boxes and finally to a point. Section 5.2.4, on pages 227-228, describes hyperspace movement, in which the nodes connected to a selected knowledge element are temporarily moved to positions around it, and then snap back to their original positions after a new node is selected.